More Track Fun

Breakfast for space cadets who leave their chobani in the fridge despite repeated reminders to themselves not to forget breakfast.

I made the executive decision that the tempo run had to get done before work today or it was likely not to happen. Working out of the mothership in Fairfax has been fun, but it is intense and the hours are crazy and by the time I get "home" after an 11 hour or so day the last thing I want to do is throw on the shoes, even though once I do I am ecstatic and feel like I could run all night.
So I gave myself three options this morning. Very early metro, semi early metro, and last metro you can take and still get back to the office at a respectable start time. My lazy butt opted for the third and I just barely made the train and in my rush forgot breakfast (I have to say Chobani and granola are much wiser breakfasts than a pay day from the machine, but it was ok in a pinch!) and my headphones. (It's going to be a quiet day at the office and a quiet commute home without Pandora!) Doh!

I also did not eat anything, caffeinate, or hydrate because you can't eat or drink on the metro! And I was cutting the timing close after having to shoot off some work emails before heading out for the run. The nice thing about the crazy commute is I had 30+ minutes of work done before I even got to work or started the workout!

I opted to go back to the track I found Tuesday because the terrain here is hilly as heck and traffic is kind of crazy, I didn't have time to find a really good tempo route so the track it was!

Goal was 3 sets of 2 miles at 6:25 pace with 7:00 miles in between each set.

Got in about 1.5 miles of warm up and started the first set from the road, did about a half mile on the road then the rest on the track. A little slow to start but got the pace down by the end. The 7:00 stuff felt nice and smooth, the 6:25s were work but doable. Given how tired I was, how I hadn't eaten and really could have used a coffee I was very pleased with how it went. I knew the paces would feel better on the track than roads and I was glad to find that was the case despite the stressful week. I'd much rather do this workout on roads, but the track is great for pacing, kind of mindless, just crank out 96 over and over and over again! I certainly didn't feel perky but everything was doable. I ran the first 3 miles in one direction and then switched directions after each 7:00 mile to try and keep the hips/core allignment happy.

6:29, 6:20, 7:02, 6:23, 6:19, 7:02, 6:16, 6:10

The warm up and cool down (1.5 each) were a little longer than I would have preferred, but that is the life of a runner on the road I guess!

In order to keep my mind from getting stressed like it did Tuesday I picked a great little tune to keep me from getting anxious and to keep my mind off of everything but the run (Another Runs on Beer recomendation, though I was a fan I just didn't know it, Lisa H. is the female vocals on all of Damien Rice's early stuff!). It has been really hard this week to not focus on work every second of the day and I found my mind drifting to my to do list a few times despite my best efforts.